Senior AI Engineer

About PubNub
PubNub powers the world’s most engaging real-time experiences—chat, live updates, and interactive applications—for over 2,000 companies including Verizon, Autodesk, Zillow, and Dropbox. Our global data network processes trillions of messages each month with sub-100 ms latency across 15+ data centers. Backed by $130M in funding, we’re shaping the future of how the world connects.

We’re now building something new: an intelligence layer that lets developers weave large language models (LLMs) and deep-learning pipelines directly into high-speed streams. We believe AI should be as real-time as the data it reasons about, and we’re hiring founding engineers to make that vision real.

The Role
As a Senior AI Engineer, you’ll architect and build cloud-native services that combine PubNub’s real-time streams with state-of-the-art AI. From retrieval-augmented generation and low-latency inference to developer tooling, you’ll create the foundation of PubNub’s intelligence platform. This is a greenfield opportunity to define architecture, drive scale, and deliver AI capabilities that power products across industries.

What You’ll Do

• Architect and build services that fuse real-time data streams with NLP, moderation, recommendation, and custom models
• Own the full ML lifecycle: pipelines, fine-tuning, evaluation, packaging, inference, and observability
• Develop internal tooling (SDKs, CLI, CI/CD hooks) so teams can add AI with a single API call
• Optimize for sub-100 ms inference at global scale using CUDA, TensorRT, vLLM, Rust, and caching strategies
• Partner with product and solution architects to deliver reusable AI capabilities: content safety, sentiment, personalization, anomaly detection, and more
• Champion responsible AI practices: robust evaluation, guardrails, governance, and transparent feedback loops

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 5+ years building production systems in Python, TypeScript, or Rust (ideally more than one)
• 1+ year delivering AI/LLM features to external users
• Experience scaling services beyond 100k req/s or equivalent event volumes
• Deep knowledge of ML tooling (PyTorch/TensorFlow, transformers, vector search, distributed training, experiment tracking)
• Strong containerization/orchestration skills (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Comfortable using AI coding copilots as part of your workflow
• Excellent written and verbal English communication

Preferred

• Experience with streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis, Redpanda)
• Hands-on work with cloud AI services (AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex, Azure OpenAI)
• Knowledge of low-level performance tuning (CUDA kernels, SIMD, memory profiling)

Why Join PubNub

• Build a greenfield intelligence platform at internet scale
• Ship features that land directly in customer-facing products across healthcare, fintech, gaming, and streaming
• Competitive Compensation in the range of USD149000-200000
• Remote-friendly culture with Open PTO
• Equity in a profitable, fast-growing infrastructure company
• A team that values craftsmanship over ego

If you’re excited to make AI real-time, we’d love to hear from you.

Note: Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship